Mohammed Nuru, deputy director for Operations at San Francisco's Department of Public Works, talks to the media at the news conference in Hunter's Point. Officials from the San Francisco Department of the Environment and representatives of arc Ecology, a grassroots environmental organization, hold a news conference where there to place the first interpretive sign outlining the toxic hazards present at the hunters pont naval shipyard.
Liz Mangelsdorf/ The Chronicle Kevin Shelley, secretary of state, has opened a probe of city-funded workers' allegations. Kevin Shelley, secretary of state, has opened a probe of city-funded workers' allegations.

Photo: LIZ MANGELSDORF

Mohammed Nuru, deputy director for Operations at San Francisco's...

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Ed Lee , Director of Public Works along with the Deputy Director of Operations Mohammed Nuru work on their technique with the Gum Buster GUMCART. According to Nuru DPW is very excited about this new technology and will be recommending its use. BY ERIC LUSE/THE CHRONICLE

Nuru has emerged as a central figure in a City Hall scandal involving alleged voting improprieties in the December runoff election won by Mayor Gavin Newsom. But according to public records and interviews, Nuru has been the subject of repeated complaints about alleged mishandling of taxpayers' funds.

Some staffers complained that Nuru, paid $150,867 a year, bent civil service rules to replace city workers with trainees from the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, or SLUG, the nonprofit he formerly ran.

Critics said that while he was a city official he pushed to extend SLUG's $1 million-per-year city grant for street-cleaning, and he allowed the nonprofit to charge the city thousands for unusual expenses: $75,000 for a double-wide trailer, $25,000 for overalls and baseball caps, $1,400 in consulting fees to a member of the SLUG board.

Once, Nuru allegedly ordered a DPW crew -- at a cost to the public of $40,000 -- to clean up a debris-strewn vacant lot near his home in Bayview- Hunters Point. Recently he was involved in requesting $70,000 in city funds to landscape another vacant lot in his neighborhood, city records show.

Some veteran DPW bureaucrats filed formal complaints, saying that when they objected to carrying out Nuru's orders, they were demoted or transferred.

Their complaints were made to the city attorney, then-District Attorney Terence Hallinan, and Public Works Director Ed Lee, among others, records show. The city never formally responded to the allegations, and no agency gave any indication it was interested in investigating, the complainants said.

The city attorney does not talk about investigations it is pursuing, said Chief Deputy City Attorney Lori Giorgi, but it takes "allegations of public corruption very seriously."

In January, nine former SLUG workers told the city Human Rights Commission that Nuru pressured them to electioneer and vote for Newsom for mayor. Nuru says he did nothing wrong, but now he is the target of a secretary of state probe of alleged election fraud, and the workers who complained in the past say the city attorney has started contacting them.

Complainants say that from the day he arrived at DPW, Nuru made clear he had been installed by the mayor to shake up a bureaucracy that Brown regarded as unresponsive, hidebound and racist. Because Nuru was the mayor's protégé, they contend, nobody wanted to take him on.

"Everybody was scared of Willie Brown," said former DPW maintenance manager Mel Humphreys, who said he was demoted and forced to retire because he objected to what he described as Nuru's use of city workers for private projects. "Nobody wanted to do anything about it."

"The guy thought it was still business as usual," she said of Nuru. Others, though, describe Nuru as a can-do administrator who makes the city a better place.

Nuru is "incredibly effective," said Isabel Wade of the Neighborhood Parks Council. "I know that he has lots of enemies at the city government level because he kicks butt and they don't like it."

Nuru and DPW Director Lee declined to be interviewed for this story.

Nuru was born in England

Nuru, 41, was born in Bristol, England, son of a British mother and a Nigerian father. As he once testified in an employment lawsuit, he was raised on a farm near Lagos, then came to the United States to study landscape architecture at Kansas State University. He graduated in 1987.

Over the next four years, Nuru said, he helped supervise big construction projects in Sacramento, Seattle, suburban Washington, D.C., and Saudi Arabia.

In 1991, he moved to San Francisco to work as No. 2 executive at SLUG, then a tiny nonprofit that maintained a network of community gardens. He had big dreams: At SLUG, he hoped he could use his love of gardening to somehow aid minority youth in Bayview-Hunters Point.

"I believe I have a green thumb," he testified. "And I also have a passion for training young people and getting people into the workforce ... getting them into jobs, welfare-to-work programs, young people who sold drugs . .. trying to teach them to become productive citizens."

Nuru took charge in 1994, and SLUG was transformed.

By the time he left in 2000, he told the grass-roots.org Web site, SLUG's budget had grown 16-fold, to more than $2 million per year. It had a full- time staff of 30. Its workers -- many of them at-risk youth -- tended 40 urban gardens and a 4-acre organic farm in Bernal Heights.

SLUG's young workers were moving "from learning to weed to learning to read," Nuru said in a newsletter. Eventually, every SLUG graduate would be expected to go to college, he said.

At the heart of SLUG's expansion was Nuru's skill at winning grants. From 1992 to 2000, public records show that SLUG obtained more than $7 million in grants from the city.

The biggest came in 1998, when the Department of Public Works agreed to pay SLUG slightly more than $1 million per year for an ambitious welfare-to- work program in which employees work four days a week cleaning streets and spend a fifth day receiving job training.

SLUG won Nuru many friends in the Bayview, and the organization was praised by environmental groups.

"Working on the farm is planting seeds of hope among the garden interns themselves," Landscape Architecture magazine said in a 1996 article. "In effect, (they are) using the connection with the earth and the plant kingdom as a means of turning lives away from crime and despair."

Other plaudits came from the U.S. Department of Energy, which listed SLUG as a success story on its "smart communities" Web site; and from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which made Nuru the keynote speaker at its National Community Involvement Conference in 2000.

Nuru was an inspiring advocate for SLUG, said Tom Branca, who met him in the mid-1990s on the board of an East Bay clone of SLUG called EBUG. Nuru was "dictatorial but a nice guy ... able to pull whatever strings were necessary to get the job done," said Branca, chair of the department of Landscape Horticulture at Oakland's Merritt College.

Branca recalled a "really moving" speech that Nuru once gave at the American Community Gardening Association's convention in Toronto, in which he described how SLUG was turning around the lives of youngsters. "Mohammed's presentation almost brought people to tears," he said.

SLUG also drew Nuru into San Francisco politics. At a SLUG event in the Bayview, Nuru met then-Assemblyman Willie Brown. In 1995, a year before he obtained U.S. citizenship, Nuru volunteered in Brown's successful campaign to unseat then-Mayor Frank Jordan, he testified.

Two years later, Nuru told his staff, he helped deliver the Bayview on Brown's controversial measure to help build a new stadium for the 49ers. The measure eked out a narrow, 1,500-vote victory, but the stadium has not been built.

Nuru also volunteered for Brown's re-election campaign in 1999, he testified. In that election, The Chronicle reported, three former SLUG employees say Nuru told them their jobs depended on Brown's re-election and required them to walk precincts, attend rallies and work phones for Brown's campaign while they were supposed to be cleaning streets.

In 2000, Brown hired Nuru to the No. 2 job at Department of Public Works, the 1,500-employee agency responsible for maintaining streets, sewers, public buildings and trees. Nuru was nominally the top aide to director Ed Lee. But employees believed the real power was Nuru, who boasted of his ties to the mayor and sometimes met with Brown without Lee.

In a city that was increasingly blighted and dirty, Nuru emerged as the mayor's go-to guy on an ambitious cleanup campaign.

To address growing concern over litter, graffiti and filth, Nuru instituted a "district by district neighborhood beautification and cleanup schedule."

He mounted Operation Scrub Down, which sent street cleaning crews into "hot spots," where grime was bad or where complaints were intense. Homeless people complained that their belongings were being trashed by Nuru's cleanup crews, but the sweeps were popular with merchants and homeowners.

Nuru took a tough line at DPW, telling his staff that Brown had put him there to shake things up. As one former manager, John Cone, later testified in an employment lawsuit, Nuru quoted Brown as calling DPW's management "a bunch of racists that were discriminating and holding people back." Nuru vowed to "get rid of those white managers," Cone said.

Some DPW staffers complained that the new boss ignored city rules for the proper use of public resources.

In December 2000, Nuru ordered a DPW crew to use city tree-toppers to hang Christmas decorations for merchants along Third Street in the Bayview, former maintenance manager Humphreys told the Civil Service Commission.

Humphreys said he resisted, contending that DPW wasn't supposed to do work for private businesses or individuals. He said Nuru blew up and accused him of "not liking his people." The project was scrapped.

In an interview, Humphreys contended that in his early days at DPW, Nuru also ordered city workers to clean up a privately owned, debris-strewn vacant lot near Nuru's home north of Candlestick Park. Humphreys put the cost of the cleanup at $40,000, and said it violated policies on the use of public resources at DPW.

Last fall, DPW asked the mayor's Office of Community Development for $70, 000 to clean up a debris-strewn, city-owned lot four doors from Nuru's home. City records show Nuru as the original DPW contact on the request.

Shirley Moore of the Candlestick Point Bayview Heights Community Group said the project was worthwhile and long overdue. She said her group got no special treatment from Nuru. She called him a good public servant who was being victimized by the allegations of election improprieties.

"Nobody can hold a torch to what he's done for the city," she said.

Concerns about SLUG grant

Critics have expressed concerns that Nuru oversees a large city grant to SLUG, the nonprofit to which they say he still has ties.

"You don't normally hire the executive director of an agency that your department is responsible for funding and overseeing, and put them in charge of the agency and the funding," said Paul Boden of the Coalition on Homelessness, who clashed with Nuru over Operation Scrubdown.

In 2002, when SLUG's street-cleaning contract expired, Nuru helped it win a one-year, $1 million extension, records show. Last month, SLUG won a new four-year, $4.8 million DPW grant.

After joining DPW, Nuru kept close ties to other nonprofits that do business with the city. He is on the board of the Clean City Coalition and the Strybing Arboretum Society, both of which have obtained DPW grants. Closer still are his ties to the San Francisco Community Restoring Urban Environments, or SF-CRUE. Nuru incorporated this nonprofit, state records show, using his DPW office as its address.

After The Chronicle inquired about SF-CRUE, DPW Director Lee sent Nuru an e-mail Feb. 9 saying he had learned that DPW was using city funds to form and raise funds for a nonprofit. Lee ordered Nuru to stop it and said city workers must pay back any money received for work on the project.

Public records show that in 2001, Nuru became locked in a contentious internal dispute over city payments to SLUG.

To get paid on its $1 million-per-year street-cleaning contract, SLUG had to submit receipts to the city. But the city official who oversaw the grant, John Cone, began rejecting repayment requests.

As Cone later testified, SLUG wanted the city to pay consulting fees of $250 per hour to a retired DPW official who once oversaw the SLUG contract. Cone rejected the $5,863 invoice.

Cone said he balked at a $25,000 bill for SLUG uniforms, including bib overalls and baseball caps. Cory Calandra, Nuru's replacement at SLUG, wrote in a letter that uniforms were needed because SLUG crews "must live up to the reputation of San Francisco as a world class city."

Cone testified that the contract didn't permit the payment.

"I thought it was a misappropriation," he testified.

Cone said he also questioned $12,500 in SLUG gas card charges, saying: "You couldn't tell if they were filling up their own cars or somebody else's."

City records reflect other unusual billings by SLUG in 2001 and 2002, including $500 for toys from Toys 'R' Us, and $1,400 for one month of "weekly group meetings" with consultant Martha Henderson, who also was a member of SLUG's board of directors.

One wrangle focused on a $65,000 bill for a double-wide trailer. As Cone described the transaction, SLUG billed the city for the trailer, saying it would be used as a classroom to train SLUG workers "to get ready for the workforce" when their jobs at the nonprofit ended.

Instead, Cone said, the trailer was set up on DPW grounds, where city workers spent perhaps $10,000 to refurbish it. After that it was used as a training facility by the DPW.

Cone said Nuru had personally approved the expenditure. Cone protested it as a misappropriation of city funds: "What they did was they manipulated the (contract) money so it could be purchased and used for DPW."

In his testimony, Cone said he came under increasing pressure from Nuru to pay the contested SLUG bills.

Their conflict played out during a time of financial distress at SLUG. By the summer of 2002 SLUG couldn't always meet its payroll or pay its bills, and for a time it had been financially unable to tend community gardens, SLUG's director wrote to the city. Cone, in testimony, said he believed Nuru was pushing him to approve the SLUG expenditures because of the cash flow problem at the nonprofit.

Finally, Cone said, Nuru replaced him with another official who signed off on the disputed payments. Cone testified about Nuru last June in a deposition in connection with an employment lawsuit that DPW worker Anthony Baeza had filed against the city. The city attorney was an adversary, defending against the lawsuit and challenging the testimony. After Cone testified, an assistant city attorney objected that his testimony was irrelevant, but did not address his contentions.

Cone died of cancer Feb. 5. In an interview before his death, he said the city showed little interest in his allegations about Nuru until after reports of suspected voting irregularities. After that, they began calling.

Cone said then that he hoped the new mayor would address the matter.

"I have pancreatic cancer," he said. "I've had a good run, but I'm finished. I have no hatred for Mr. Nuru, but I do want to see DPW get back on track, and I'd like to see the taxpayers get what they're paying for."